I'm not sure that would count as real nostalgia. It sounds more like a desire to connect with the past, particularly a past that you never could have experienced.
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FrustratedWithFormsDesignerNov 30 '11 at 19:08

Is there a reason it couldn't be called nostalgia?
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JuliaNov 30 '11 at 22:24

11 Answers
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I think the word wistful captures that sense of wishing for something, tinged with regret. I'm not sure that nostalgia requires you to have experienced the thing you're missing, but it does require it to be in the past. Wistfulness doesn't - I can feel wistful thinking of something I could be doing, or had once thought I would be doing by now, and neither of those fits nostalgia.

+1 because I was thinking of wistfulness before I scrolled down to see your answer. I'm not sure you'd normally be wistful about something in the future that was never in the past though - unless it's a future which the past/present has already ruled out for some reason. On the other hand, nostalgia ain't what it used to be, and probably never could be again. But if you act on your wistfulness you might well (re-)live the actual experience.
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FumbleFingersNov 30 '11 at 19:25

I suppose that is about right; I mean it doesn't exactly capture the meaning, but with supporting statements that would be a good word to finish the thought with.
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BobDec 1 '11 at 0:21

I've been known to use this term for its direct meaning as a "longing and nostalgia for a far-off home one has never visited," but it can be inflected or further defined to describe what you mean. So far, it's the most satisfactory English (technically, German) noun I've found to describe this phenomena.

This is technically not an answer, since we are strictly talking about English words, but there is a term in Brazilian Portuguese that encompasses the feeling you've described: saudade. Enough of your readers may be familiar with it, depending on the context.

I always thought saudade could perfectly well refer to things you have never experienced. If we look to the Wikipedia article as a benchmark for what people think the word means, we see the following quoted in the opening section: "...vague and constant desire for something that does not and probably cannot exist... a turning towards the past or towards the future."
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alcasNov 30 '11 at 23:29

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@alcas I am a native Portuguese speaker and I've never seen "saudade" used in that sense.
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OrionNov 30 '11 at 23:30

No one seems quite sure if nostalgia can be correctly used regarding something you have not personally experienced. I'm going to say that it can, because I have found more than one seemingly respectable source with a definition that does not include that personal experience as a necessary condition for nostalgia.

Cambridge Dictionaries Online: a feeling of pleasure and sometimes slight sadness at the same time as you think about things that happened in the past

Merriam-Webster: a wistful or excessively sentimental yearning for return to or of some past period or irrecoverable condition; also : something that evokes nostalgia

I suppose it would make decent sense to just explicitly state nostalgia being without experience, this I think would be more widely digestible for readers than any lesser known term.
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BobDec 1 '11 at 14:51

@Bob I see your point. I'm resistant, however, to complicate it unnecessarily. Are you saying that, despite these definitions from respected sources, most people expect that nostalgia can only be about something personally experienced? I'm not saying they don't. I just don't know. How do we find that out?
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sarahDec 8 '11 at 6:46

The question reminds me of a theme that Woody Allen explores in his recent film Midnight in Paris. He uses the term "Golden Age Thinking" to describe this kind of nostalgia for a time period that you only know through literature, art & music. As defined in the film, "Golden Age Thinking" is:

"the erroneous notion that a different time period is better than the one one's living in."

and further:

"it is a flaw in the romantic imagination of those people who find it difficult to cope with the present" and that "nostalgia is denial, denial of the painful present."

For some crazy reason - I've always wished it was 1938 again. That blip in time when the Depression was over, we still struggled - but we all did. War wasn't on our horizon yet, and we were all, well... safe. I wouldn't call it an MGM moment, but I wonder if it's close. I yearn for that simpler America -